Promising method for cancer therapy featured by scientific journal

2018-07-03

The most recent issue of Journal of Nuclear Medicine features a study from IGP as article of the month. The study, led by Vladimir Tolmachev, shows a new promising method to treat cancer by delivering radioactive substances to tumours.

One way of treating cancer is to deliver radioactive substances, radionuclides, into the tumour where the radiation can kill cancer cells or slow down their growth. For the radionuclides to be delivered in the tumour, and not end up in other tissues or organs, they must be linked to substances that specifically recognise targets on the cancer cells.

Affibody molecules are one type of such targeting substances but their use in cancer therapy has so far been prevented by their absorption in the kidneys. In the present study the researchers have examined a method to pre-treat the Affibody molecules so that they can target a tumour, and deliver radionuclides there, and at the same time be rapidly cleared from the kidneys.

The results show that with this pre-treatment of the Affibody-associated radionuclides can be used in a safe way in patients and could therefore be developed to a novel method for radiotherapy of cancer.

The study was performed in collaboration with researchers at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Uppsala University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Erasmus MC in the Netherlands.